Yan Chen is an associate professor of information. Previously, she was on the faculty of the U-M Economics Department. Her research interests are in information economics, including experimental economics, mechanism design, voting theory, and public finance.

Yan will take over the directorship of the STIET program on July 1, 2008 when Jeff MacKie-Mason assumes responsibility as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the School of Information.

"The fundamental challenge my research addresses is the design of robust economic mechanisms when agents are not perfectly rational," she says. Mechanism design theory assumes people are perfectly rational and can reach an equilibrium instantly in an economic situation. Chen's research looks at questions of how people really learn in such situations, what types of mechanisms aid that learning, and whether such learning can eventually lead to the states of "equilibrium" predicted by theory. She conducts both theoretical and experimental research, bringing human subjects into the laboratory to work with economic games.